this post was submitted on 29 May 2023
45 points (100.0% liked)
Piracy
22189 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to /c/piracy
No netflix or streaming services landlubbers allowed, this is pirates territory.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What is (or rather was) it used for?
If you have a service you want reachable you need to port forward on a shared service like this.
So it's necessary for reach-ability for torrent clients, web-hosting, game hosting, any kind of hosting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_forwarding
But I don't understand. I have always torrented using Mullvad without Port Forwarding and it always worked. How so?
There's a nice post about it on the superuser forum here (along with more in-depth posts that you can easily find by searching).
PF = Port Forwarding
w/ = With
wo/ = Without
The TL;DR is that at least one person must have PF enabled in whatever operation you're performing. So if you're downloading wo/ PF enabled, then you can only download from seeders w/ PF enabled. If you're seeding wo/ PF enabled, you can only seed to downloaders/peers w/ PF enabled.
You'll notice that if you have PF enabled, you're guaranteed to have all options open, whereas if you don't, you're more limited (although in most cases are still able to perform P2P normally)
Makes sense. So everything would be slower. Damn, that's a pity but I actually have never used it until now and sadly I cannot change this since I use Mullvad. I even seeded a lot without knowing this. What a pity tho, that would have been a game changer